Poor In Spirit

"Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven." (Mt 5:3)

Spiritual Poverty as the Way to Open One's Heart to God Who is Knocking

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, [then] I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me." (Rev 3:20)

Open Wide the Door to Christ is the book the Missionaries of Charity were reading as part of the Thursday conferences when I arrived. I caught the last couple of chapters, I think. What I heard was enough to make the book stick with me and think I should like to pick it up and read it some day. I've had it in my possession for more than the past month and have only finally begun to read it. Here are a few quotes from what I've read, and I've only just begun. Though taken out of context, I hope they can shed some light on what it means to be poor in spirit. 


"- the reality that spiritual poverty is the only path that allows us to obtain the only true treasure worth living for, our complete union with and participation in the inner life of our Triune God." 

"We need to listen for God's patient knocking.  He waits for us to open the doors of our hearts so He can rescue us from the temporal prisons of our own design."

St. John of the Cross calls "spiritual poverty", the stripping of the soul from everything that is not God. 

God's knocking is His call to you to turn your head and fix the gaze of your soul in His direction. He wants to give you His heart and, in this way, fill the emptiness of your human heart which is greedy for garbage. 

He has to crush the barricades that surround the heart and reconstruct our interior selves such that our interior selves will be pleasing to Him, not to us. 

... the path to poverty entails turning our hearts away from the things to which we are attached so that we are not enslaved by them.

God desires to give you the freedom of spiritual poverty... (losing something - paraphrased) is His way of asking you to accept loss so that you may become poor and free for Him. 

At present, much of this sounds painful. Yet, we are taught to believe, through the examples of the saints, joy will come from all this. After all, we were not made for this world, but for eternity, for "participation in the inner life of our Triune God." Our reward is not to be had on earth, but to be stored up in heaven to be given to us when we arrive.  

I pray the beginning of your Lent is blessed, as "our Lenten penance may be more effective if we fail in our resolution than if we succeed, for its purpose is not to confirm us in our sense of virtue, but to bring home to us our radical need of salvation." "Jesus is Savior, but he will only save those who know their need for salvation."   - Mark Searle, the Spirit of Lent

Being a Sales Representative

I feel like a leper. As soon as people figure out that I’m not calling from a local location, and I work for a business where my sole job is to ask people if they want to advertise on a Catholic parish’s website, they get cold. Some people have a natural phobia of sales people. Some just don’t want to talk to a stranger. Others, well, I don’t know what to say about them.

There are points in my day where I don’t want to keep calling these businesses, because I am, eighty percent certain I’ll be rejected. Actually, they aren’t rejecting me and I cannot take this personally. They are rejecting the opportunity to advertise on a website. However, I’ve learned that doing what I don’t want to do is good for me and good for business. I have to sift out all the “no’s” to find the “yeses”. Most times that’s about one in sixty at this point, but hey, that’s what makes what I do challenging.

I didn’t like it for the first two weeks, I admit. Cold calling is not fun. But the environment in which I work, the people I get to have lunch with, and ping pong are all great. Being a Sponsorship Sales Representative is growing my mental toughness. I don’t want to call these people, but you know what, I can’t avoid it and there is no point in wasting my time. I’m better off just calling the people, and asking them if they would be interested in supporting a parish in this manner. Sometimes there is a grouch on the other end of the phone, sometimes there’s a little old lady who has squirrels and birds in her attic and a skunk under her house who is still very joyful about life. (I talked with her this morning. She never married and doesn’t have any kids, so there is no one to take care of her home except for her. The alterations lady in Kingman, if anyone is looking for a kind deed to do or an elderly person to go visit and spend time with.)

One of my realizations today, and I’ve been gradually discovering over the last three weeks, is that I can pray for the people I talk to, whether it be the couple who just took over a general store, the insurance man who is venturing out on his own, of just someone who might not be having the best of days, I can pray for these complete strangers. I may never know what comes of them or if my prayers and efforts have any effect on them, but nonetheless, I can pray for them. 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.